To be honest, I don't see why people hate on him. He decides who gets nerfed and not? Is that really a good reason for someone to get fired? 10% of the WoW players feel like they don't do enough dps? Wow....
Might just be me though...

A lot of people here don't seem to understand how a corporate work actually happens. You don't fire the guy who gives face and takes the "blame" for everything that happens in a company. You keep him happy and give a nice bonus for taking huge amounts of crap and still acting professional.

Maybe that sentence might imply that I think he is doing a bad job which i don't. He is the guy going on the worst possible environment on the Internet (dedicated forums) and explaining decisions taken by several people (his team, the team above that cares of them, the people above, the people above, the people above that have decision, the people above that veto those decisions, etc etc).

Give the guy a rest, even people like myself who played 14 hours a day for years are getting somewhat bored with the game, not because its bad but because thats just what happens.

He is trying to be the voice for a lot of different people.
As a result what he says will not always be consistent.

He is not responsible for a lot of what he communicates, just being the primary outlet through which much of it it communicated.
How many of these posts do we get from other developers ?

^this guy has it. People are complete ignoring the fact that there are multiple WoW teams that work on changes, not a single person.

Also, based on quite a bunch of blue posts and a couple of MMO-champ threads, it seems people assume they know what goes on at Blizzard but they complete forget that they have absolutely no clue what actually goes on. (Example is the recent blue post where GC has to explain they have priorities and that they do not have infinite time/resources/employees)

WoW without flying is like having Pizza, instead of flying right over it

^this guy has it. People are complete ignoring the fact that there are multiple WoW teams that work on changes, not a single person.

Also, based on quite a bunch of blue posts and a couple of MMO-champ threads, it seems people assume they know what goes on at Blizzard but they complete forget that they have absolutely no clue what actually goes on. (Example is the recent blue post where GC has to explain they have priorities and that they do not have infinite time/resources/employees)

Yet the poster above you (and others like him) just want to blame GC for making The game no longer cater to them, when in fact the game changes they disdain was made by a menagerie of people.

^this guy has it. People are complete ignoring the fact that there are multiple WoW teams that work on changes, not a single person.

Also, based on quite a bunch of blue posts and a couple of MMO-champ threads, it seems people assume they know what goes on at Blizzard but they complete forget that they have absolutely no clue what actually goes on. (Example is the recent blue post where GC has to explain they have priorities and that they do not have infinite time/resources/employees)

Wait?? You're actually saying that Bobby Kotick didn't design the Barrens questline? But he's the root of all evil and bathes in submoney and baby blood daily!

It would be pretty funny to see all the hate directed at GC switch over to whoever replaced him. Hell, he could have left his position and taken compensation for remaining the figure head while having nothing to do with the game, and nobody would ever know.

I don't think he deserves to lose his position.
To be honest, the problem is in the upper echelons. He's just a gameplay guy who enjoys a little attention from the community. Not a big fish in any respect.

Greg isn't to be held responsible for the sub losses, really. Old game, old graphics, repetitive gameplay. It starts to get boring after 7 years

He was the one who tried out more open communication with the player base and I still applaud him for that approach since getting no response ever (even if you don't agree, you can still start a constructive argument!) is reeeeeaaallly frustrating, especially for a mage who has been living through the sunwell era.

Also, he is lead systems designer, yes, but that doesn't mean that everything he says is the word of god. Really, don't you people know how teams work? He might be the coordinator and work on the overall balance and design, but he's neither the single person directly responsible for every fucked up mechanic, nor for bad quests or out of control scaling of class X. If you knew how screwed up mechanics and balance were in the "golden era" of TBC, ask Nihilum on TK or Vashj. Or any moonkin, retridin, bear and ele shaman. Compared to this, MoP is like a professional paradise.

Plus... for me GC has the scientist bonus. Sci pride

That being said, I don't want Metzen to be fired as well. Even if the current lore, especially during Cata, but parts of MoP as well, is really really bad in my eyes. Let people improve since we know they can do better. And again, he won't be the sole responsible person for... say... the glorification of Anduin, the strangeness of Sylvanas, the overall sausagefest and the "WTF" of Tyrande...

This kind of thread is, in my opinion, representative of just how much out of touch the online communitites of the game are with the actual community of the game itself; as well as how uninformed about the structure of companies.

Ghostcrawler is one of the lead developers of the game, true. But he is, at best, one among several people that make the big decisions at Blizzard, if even that. He is just given an assignment most of the time, to be carried out under certain conditions, with certain resources. And his is only one part of the game which he supervises and leads; one among many parts. So what do you expect from him? If the direction of the game is decided to be towards a certain place his work is to carry out his part of the steering, nothing else.

Has he failed partly? Oh yes. A lot actually. He has removed so much of the uniquness of classes and specialisations. Dumped down theory-crafting elements. Almost eradicated sandbox gameplay. Streamlined the #&$% out of the game, and has cut so many elements that most of the classes and specialisations feel tasteless, unexciting, routinely "okish", safe, predictable, restrained. He has substituted the excitement one should feel by playing a game with logical equality in performance, not! balance.

He has failed to understand that most players don't give a damn about balance; they just want to have fun. And that by catering to some echo chamber-effect driven minority that hangs around forums, he has missed the vast majority of players that don't even visit sites about the game. Oh yeah: MMOC's 36k active posters are nothing compared to the game's 7 million + players, or the past 12 million. They are not even representative of the community, because they are not chosen randomly. Yet he caters to them, and their never-ending conversations about "balance," whatever that is supposed to mean.

Even worse, he is a professional that should have long ago understood one simple thing: there can be no balance between two or more different elements. Only identical elements can be equal. So the best thing to do is strive for some semblance of equality, while keeping fun and excitement as his most important goal. But then again, even though instanced gameplay is far from what most players enjoy in the game, it's what the company is trying to promote, because it's easier to develop content for, and cheaper; and of course in instanced content you need balance for PvP, and absence of uniqueness for 10-man raiding in PvE. And so, whether he wants to or not, Ghostcrawler has been tasked to play his part in steering the game to be more accomodating towards those activities.

Which leads to the actual reason why the game is declining so fast in subscriptions: fatigue. Not that much from the age of the game, but its content: its focus on instanced content in both PvE and PvP. Such content is desirable from high-performance players; actually the closer it is to a MOBA or a fighting game in an arena the better; but it's boring to most players of the game. Because the vast majority doesn't care about raiding or arena. They joined the game when it was an open-world role-playing game. When there was a vast world for them to play in, adventure and explore. Vanilla was the period of time that the game met its highest rise in players in percentages; and the time when, barring a small minority of ever-complaing high-performance players or their wannabe followers, most players actually enjoyed the game; they were genuinely excited about logging in and playing, as opposed to routinely logging in to do their online chores nowadays.

That's what made the game such a raving success: its open world. Not the dungeons. If it relied on dungeons then it would have stopped at the usual 200k subscribers mark of all other similar mmorpgs; perhaps gone a bit further because of its accessiblity. But that would be it. The several-million-players success story was built on the one thing WoW did better than any mmorpg until then, or since: its tenths of zones, with their thousand of quests, its exploration, and sense of a vast world filled with immense potential. Not the grind for points and shinies that it has become now.

And it's quite obvious really: Shenmue, Driver, Zelda, Yakuza, Fallout, Grand Theft Auto; do you know what they all have in common? Hugely successful games. With an open world theme. Most recently Skyrim, with its horrible combat and clunky animations, surpassed 10 million copies sold, in an era where piracy is huge, on PCs especially. So the actual number of people that have playeed it? Yeah, one can only imagine. 10 million + players. Which other open-world role-playing game once had such numbers? Hmm....That's the genre WoW belonged to in Vanilla, and that's the genre it has forsaken, and a major reason of why it has declined so much in popularity. Shinies instead of actual open-world content is only going to take you so far. And this seems to be the extent of the trick's longevity. Most players are just bored and tired of grinding points instead of playing a proper open-world role-playing game. So they leave.

But that is not just Ghostcrawler's fault, if at all, it is the company's fault for deciding not to invest in the kind of content most players enjoy, but try to shoehorn almost everyone into the cheaper and faster to develop for instanced content. And these are the results.

I like GC as a person but I don't think that he does his job well. Ever since he moved to the forefront, WoW has been deteriorating instead of improving.

NINJA TURTLES as the next playable WoW race/class combo. WoW has got Kung Fu Pandas, Pokemon and recently even Transformers in it, so I don't see how Ninja Turtles would be any less pathetic than current "WoW" is.

The sub loss was going to happen regardless of what Blizzard did. You can't capture lightning in a bottle twice. Those of you who gripe about WoW's changes don't seem to realize that without those changes, WoW's subs would be in the 1 million range at this point.

I could care less if there were 100,000 subs, if only they hadn't ruined a perfectly good game after BC. At least the 1 mil subs would be happy players, not a bunch of people who cant stop playing because of the time they have invested in this game.